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ZDNet: Microsoft patents a threat to open source

Debate continues over the Mono project and whether it's
appropriate for open source developers to play ball with Microsoft
over .NET:

"But while Jeremy Allison, a lead developer for Samba, confirmed
that Microsoft holds the patent for the password change protocol,
he believed this "was done with no malicious intent at all. All big
companies patent software for protection. I also think this is
probably a defective patent anyway," he said.

Microsoft's Mundie said he wasn't familiar with the Samba
example, "but in any case where someone reverse-engineers
technology -- and there's certainly lots of this in the Linux world
-- there's always the risk they'll infringe on someone's patent. We
highly value intellectual property and the laws created to protect
this," he said.

But Samba's [Jeremy] Allison said the Mono Project is "a very
bad idea -- in fact, it's a terrible idea. By doing this they are
helping .Net become a standard. ".Net will become important if a
majority of the clients use it, but it will not be mandatory if
only, say, 50 percent use it, as Web sites will then still have to
do Java stuff," Allison said. "By implementing an open-source
version of this, they are making it easier for Microsoft to get to
that magic monopoly figure."